The origins of the informative-presupposition it-cleft

Prince (1978) identified two functionally distinct classes of it-cleft: the stressed focus (SF) and the informative-presupposition (IP) it-cleft. While the SF it-cleft marks an open proposition as Chafe-given, the clause of the IP it-cleft conveys information which is new in the discourse and possibly unknown to the reader. The origins of this distinction have not previously been discussed, and offer an interesting problem in diachronic pragmatics. In this paper, I bring to bear facts gathered from a corpus-based investigation of the history of the it-cleft. The IP it-cleft is shown to be a Late Middle English innovation, arising from the convergence of several cleft and cleft-like copular constructions, all of which historically allowed new information in the complement.

[1]  Tauno F. Mustanoja,et al.  A Middle English syntax , 1960 .

[2]  Peter Collins,et al.  Cleft and Pseudo-Cleft Constructions in English , 1991 .

[3]  Z. Harris.  The Elementary Transformations , 1970 .

[4]  Ellen F. Prince,et al.  On the Syntactic Marking of Presupposed Open Propositions , 1986 .

[5]  Catherine N. Ball,et al.  The historical development of the it-cleft , 1991 .

[6]  Nancy Hedberg,et al.  The Discourse Functions of Cleft Sentences in Spoken English , 1988 .

[7]  Michiko Ogura.  Old English 'impersonal' verbs and expressions , 1986 .

[8]  F. G. Fowler,et al.  The King's English , 1979 .

[9]  J. B. Phillips.  The New Testament in modern English , 1972 .

[10]  Ellen F. Prince,et al.  Toward a taxonomy of given-new information , 1981 .

[11]  Catherine N. Ball.  Relative pronouns in it-clefts: The last seven centuries , 1994, Language Variation and Change.

[12]  Willy Elmer,et al.  Diachronic Grammar: The History of Old and Middle English Subjectless Constructions , 1981 .

[13]  Renaat Declerck,et al.  Studies on Copular Sentences, Clefts and Pseudo-Clefts , 1988 .

[14]  A. J. Ayer,et al.  Language, Truth, and Logic , 1936 .

[15]  Gerald Patrick Delahunty,et al.  Topics in the syntax and semantics of English cleft sentences , 1982 .

[16]  Jeanette K. Gundel.  ‘Shared knowledge’ and topicality , 1985 .

[17]  C. Allen,et al.  Topics in diachronic English syntax , 1977 .

[18]  B. Mitchell,et al.  Short titles of Old English texts: addenda and corrigenda , 1979, Anglo-Saxon England.

[19]  E. Prince.  Fancy syntax and ‘shared knowledge’ , 1985 .

[20]  J. Delin,et al.  Cleft constructions in discourse. , 1990 .

[21]  Michael Rochemont,et al.  Focus in Generative Grammar , 1986 .

[22]  Jan Svartvik,et al.  A __ comprehensive grammar of the English language , 1988 .

[23]  Rosanna Sornicola,et al.  It-Clefts and Wh-clefts: two awkward sentence types , 1988, Journal of Linguistics.

[24]  Nancy Hedberg,et al.  Discourse pragmatics and cleft sentences in English , 1990 .

[25]  B. Mitchell,et al.  Short titles of Old English texts , 1975, Anglo-Saxon England.

[26]  E. Prince.  A COMPARISON OF WH-CLEFTS AND IT-CLEFTS IN DISCOURSE , 1978 .

[27]  From ce suis je to c'est moi (The Ego as Subject and as Predicative in Old French) , 1948 .

[28]  A. Kemenade.  Syntactic Case and Morphological Case in the History of English , 1987 .